Category: Reviews

IF Comp 2015: Onaar (Robert DeFord)

The 21st annual Interactive Fiction Competition is currently on, through mid-November. Voting is open to the general public; the only prerequisite is that you not be an author, not vote on games that you tested, and submit votes on at least five games. (You emphatically do not have to have played them all! In a year with 55 entrants, it is very unlikely that most judges will get through anywhere near all of them.)

Onaar cover artIf you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Onaar is interactive fiction at the role-playing end of the spectrum: there’s a large world containing a lot of interchangeable resources, a number of possible goals that are presented explicitly as side missions, and interactions that are less about puzzle solving than about gathering and crafting. Objects respawn in some locations. I did not finish the game in two hours, though I didn’t ever really get stuck or turn to the walkthrough. It’s just that there’s quite a bit to do here, and a lot of the progress is slow.

I wasn’t able to play this using the hacked Mac Gargoyle interpreter included in the game package — that refused to launch for me — but WINE did run the hacked Windows Gargoyle.

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IF Comp 2015: The Baker of Shireton (Hanon Ondricek)

The 21st annual Interactive Fiction Competition is currently on, through mid-November. Voting is open to the general public; the only prerequisite is that you not be an author, not vote on games that you tested, and submit votes on at least five games. (You emphatically do not have to have played them all! In a year with 55 entrants, it is very unlikely that most judges will get through anywhere near all of them.)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Cover art for Baker of ShiretonThe Baker of Shireton is a parser simulation game satirizing MMOs; it includes a large number of independently acting NPCs and different events to coordinate. Even though I did glance at the walkthrough, there was so much going on that I did not master the game in the play time allotted for competition play.

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IF Comp 2015: Two Shorts

The 21st annual Interactive Fiction Competition is currently on, through mid-November. Voting is open to the general public; the only prerequisite is that you not be an author, not vote on games that you tested, and submit votes on at least five games. (You emphatically do not have to have played them all! In a year with 55 entrants, it is very unlikely that most judges will get through anywhere near all of them.)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Cover for Seeking Ataraxia

This time around I have short comments on two pieces that were themselves not very long plays: Forever Meow and Seeking Ataraxia. (Edited to reflect: initially I thought that Forever Meow was built on a rather modified base of Twine, but in fact it’s a custom engine. Sorry about that!)

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IF Comp 2015: Koustrea’s Contentment (Jeremy Pflasterer)

The 21st annual Interactive Fiction Competition is currently on, through mid-November. Voting is open to the general public; the only prerequisite is that you not be an author, not vote on games that you tested, and submit votes on at least five games. (You emphatically do not have to have played them all! In a year with 55 entrants, it is very unlikely that most judges will get through anywhere near all of them.)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Koustrea cover artKoustrea’s Contentment is a pretty sizable parser puzzle game. It does not come with a full walkthrough, and no walkthrough at all was included in my original comp download, so I spent quite a bit of my available two hours wandering around making little progress — but even had that not been the case, I could not have finished it on time. The author knows that this is likely and states as much in the ABOUT text for the game.

All the same, there’s some interesting stuff going on here. The TADS 3 world model is used to good effect. It may be hard to play as a Comp game, but it combines high implementation standards and some modern design niceties with an old-school taste for freedom and open-endedness.

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IF Comp 2015: Duel (piato)

The 21st annual Interactive Fiction Competition is currently on, through mid-November. Voting is open to the general public; the only prerequisite is that you not be an author, not vote on games that you tested, and submit votes on at least five games. (You emphatically do not have to have played them all! In a year with 55 entrants, it is very unlikely that most judges will get through anywhere near all of them.)

If you are looking for other reviews, this ifwiki page contains a list of places currently carrying them.

Cover image for Duel showing a hand with long black nails

Duel is a choice-based puzzle game about a battle between magic-users. You are bound, and can use only your assortment of spells. It takes only a few minutes to play once, but somewhat longer to work out to completion.

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Guest post: Kane County reviewed by SA

cover1The following review is the result of a trade. Gamebook author SA asked me to review their work, and I agreed, if SA would in turn review a currently-running IF Comp game. Here is SA’s review of Kane County, which I’m hosting as SA doesn’t have a suitable blog of their own. I also reviewed Kane County.

*

Kane County is a well-written and sharply designed piece of interactive fiction that excels when it comes to gameplay but at the expense of both storyline and character development. The opening section reads, “You’d been desperately trying to outrun the storm overhead and the shadows of your past, but one of them was catching up.” I can’t help but wonder how much more engaging this entry might have been if it were more than just the storm closing in on the narrator.

I played twice – first as the extreme athlete and then second as the survivalist (the latter yielding better results for me personally). Both classes offered a very detailed gaming experience which highlighted the authors’ expert grasp of the landscape and its perils. Not once did I find myself questioning the logic of the choices or the difficulties being presented in the various environments. It is in this regard that I feel both Michael Sterling and Tia Orisney deserve top marks.

On the other hand, I feel there was a missed opportunity here by simply mentioning the narrator’s past but not allowing it to have an actual impact on the gameplay itself. Kane County, if played well, is not necessarily a short read – I survived long enough to be rescued by a helicopter but it took some time. There were a lot of well-written sections describing different environments and the narrator’s suffering amongst them all but even these started to feel stale after a while. Eventually it read more like an interactive survival guide rather than an interactive story – perhaps that was the authors’ intent but then why peak interest in the narrator’s checkered past at all.

An element of drama beyond just the struggle of man versus wild would have helped in my humble opinion. Having someone trying to hunt me down or having another person share the adventure with me to create engaging discourse could have gone a long way in adding nuances to the read. But with all that being said, good and bad, this is still a solid entry that deserves a go. If nothing more, readers will get a sense of how to structure interactive fiction effectively through compelling, well-written verses.

– Review by S.A.